Moomin Embroidery

Following on from the success of my Meme Cushion embroidery which I made for my Aunt last year, I decided to make her another embroidered gift for her birthday this year. She loves the Moomins and she is Moominmama and I am Snorkmaiden, so I decided to embroider the 2 of them, smiling at each other.

I tried to draw the moomins myself, but it turns out I’m not Tove Jansson. So I traced them off my computer screen, because it allowed me to resize the 2 separate pictures so they matched. Plus I flipped the paper as they were both facing the same way but I wanted them facing each other. I then pinned the paper to my fabric and used the lines to sew the outlines in black, using a back stitch.

I should really have used tracing paper – or certainly something thinner than printer paper – because it was not as easy as I had anticipated to remove the paper between the stitches. It took ages and needed my overlocker tweezers! You can see tiny bits of white left around the eyes.

The main stitch I used for the moomins was split stitch – which looks a lot like chain stitch when you’re using 2 strands of embroidery thread, as I was using. It was really lucky I discovered this stitch because my original idea was to fill them in with straight lines going back and forth, but I had started doing that and it looked a bit rubbish. Then we happened across a programme on BBC iPlayer about the history of British embroidery, and specifically about religious embroidery, where they demonstrated this split stitch as a way of filling in sections of embroidery, to make them look particularly full. So I tried this and it looked so much better than the previous thing I was doing.

The apron (and the other bits in other colours) is still filled in in the old style I was going to do all of it in. I thought the apron looked fine as it was and it had taken ages and I didn’t want to undo it and redo it.

The circles on the bottom of the apron were done with french knots, which I think I knew how to do at one point years ago, but I looked up how to do them on youtube. I love youtube – you can find how to do anything on youtube!

I’m really quite pleased with the swirls on the noses. I tried to make sure the direction of the stitches didn’t look odd compared to the shape of the moomins as I thought that would look weird.

My original plan had been to cover the back, but a) I ran out of time and b) I didn’t know how to do it! The back doesn’t look toooo messy, but I probably would have preferred it if I had covered it up.

I decided to leave this as a sort of display thing, and not to make it into something else. The only thing I could really think of to make it into apart from another cushion and I didn’t think giving cushions for 2 birthdays in a row would be the thing to do.

I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out, if I do say so myself! I think I might have been bitten by the embroidery bug which seems to be growing amongst sewists. I’ve no idea what I’m going to make next year…….